social networking

Tiiny, the new social media app from Digg-founder Kevin Rose, has just lost access to Instagram's social graph, meaning users on the former can no longer easily find and connect with their friends from the later. The simplest, and most logical, reason for this is that Instagram views Tiiny as a possible growing threat to its dominance, and doesn't want to give it a free leg up in the ever-competing social network market.

Known mainly as the RSS reader/syncing tool that many internet users flocked to when Google Reader was shut down, web service Feedly is looking to dip its toes into the social pool with a number of new social network-like features. Most obvious among these is a new publicly-viewable profile and user name, as well as the ability to share collections of feeds and updates.

Social media is an established part of life at this point, but how society deals with it is still be worked out. For a long while, it wasn't uncommon for employers to demand access to accounts, and many have been fired over what they choose to share. Schools often monitor students' social media accounts, and a new California bill has specifically targeted that.

The advertisement business is big. Google has cashed in with AdSense in a major way in the recent past, and Facebook wants a piece of their pie. To grab said action, Facebook is releasing Atlas, a system that aims to "track people instead of cookies" both on the desktop platform and on mobile devices.

There’s an app out there this week called Wayfare, and I’m genuinely impressed by its ability to make me create and share with people I don’t know halfway around the world. You turn the app on, sign up, and are almost instantly connected with another Wayfare user in a different country. From there, you become short-term digital penpals.

You’ve probably seen Ello pop up on your RSS feed (or however you happen to keep up with information) over the past few days. The new social media site has been dubbed the “anti-Facebook”, due to its strikingly sparse interface and promise to not make you the product. To gauge how accurate that is, I went inside to discover what Ello is, and who it isn’t for.

Facebook is a good way to find news (you can find us there, too!), but has faced quite a bit of criticism for not providing timely posts. Today, Facebook is announcing changes to their news feed that will provide users with topical info that is popular, and not simply a sampling of everything in your feed.

Before you comment in rage, note that this experiment was not initiated by Facebook or Oculus VR. Instead it’s a proof-of-concept by a team working under the title Dense Planar SLAM. They’re here to make you understand: the next step in virtual reality is crossing the line between virtual reality and real reality - augmented reality, that is to say.

Today, Google is announcing they’ve made another acquisition, this time in a startup named Polar. If you’re unfamiliar, don’t worry — the company focusses on online polls, not an app you’re missing out on. It’s being reported that Polar will be cobbled into Google+, suggesting that Google is, at least in some respect, forging ahead with its social layer.

Facebook is testing self-destructing status messages, with some users spotting Snapchat-like expiration options in the company's iOS app. The new option, not yet available to all users, offers a range of times from a single hour of visibility through to seven days.